An Interview with Travis Chi Wing Lau

Travis Chi Wing Lau’s latest poetry collection, What’s Left is Tender, examines tenderness in all its form—a gentle touch, a state of softness after violence, a youthfulness, an exchange, a bodily ache. Across these experimental poems, Lau guides the reader through a lyric exploration of the pains and joys of caring for others and being cared for as a disabled and queer person of color, asking the question of how we can move forward to make a more sustainable, caring world. 

In this interview, Mialise Carney and Travis Chi Wing Lau discuss tenderness, innovative poetics, embracing the disabled bodymind as a creative, and the slow scholarship movement.

Mialise Carney: What’s Left is Tender begins with an epigraph from Aracelis Girmay, “& so to tenderness I add my action,” which is such a perfect encapsulation of the themes in this collection. How do you see this epigraph shaping these poems and guiding the reader’s experience?

Travis Chi Wing Lau: When I first encountered Girmay’s work (the black maria, especially, where this line comes from), it was a transformative experience as a model by a writer of color for what tenderness can look and feel like in verse. Well-before I realized that tenderness was at the core of my work, I got this line tattooed in the inner part of my left arm as a reminder for how to live—with tenderness first. I wanted in this collection to represent tenderness’ ubiquity across so much of my experience, even negative or painful ones. Your last part of the question about how the epigraph is “guiding the reader’s experience” is a fantastic one: I do want the epigraph to be a kind of refrain for the reader as they navigate the collection. A mantra or practice to be tender with themselves in the process of inhabiting these poems, which sometimes are meant to leave readers a little tender to the touch.

MC: Throughout these poems, you explore tender in all its forms—an act of care, the ache of chronic pain, the expectation of softness to arrive after violence (as in tenderizing). How did you arrive at this exploration of tender in your poetry, and what does tender mean to you now?

TCWL: As I implied in my previous answer, I really didn’t realize this book (and my work as a whole) was about tenderness until I was at Q&A at my second chapbook’s launch reading in Tulsa. My colleague, Don James McLaughlin, observed that tenderness was word that kept reappearing across my work, and it occurred to me then that this first full-length had to follow that common thread seriously, substantively. As a scholar of literary history, I frequently teach students to use the Oxford English Dictionary as a tool to open up possibilities for interpretation during close reading. Because it offers a robust etymological history for words we think we know, I always find it to be an experience of surprise to discover what a word has meant that might now be obsolete to us. “Tender” has always had that doubleness of meaning that we tend to forget: it isn’t just about softness or sentimentality but also potentially pain and hurt, which I feel the collection tries to recover across history and lived experience.

MC: Each page and poem in this collection is a new surprise for the reader as you experiment with different found forms, shapes, angles for your poetry—I’m thinking of “To My Rib,” which takes the shape of a rib, “Autodefenestration,” which takes the form of a window, “Interpretation of Results,” where takes the form of a MRI result and the voice of a judgmental doctor, to name just a few. How do you approach form in your poetry and what do you like about it? 

TCWL: A running joke about my creative formation as a poet has actually been my deep resentment about literary form, especially metrically rigid poetic forms. When I was a creative writer in high school, I was constantly around poets who fetishized “difficult” poetic forms like the sestina as somehow a testament to their skill as a poet to “overcome” the challenge these forms present. As someone who resents thinking about creative practice as competition, I found myself deliberately moving away from structure and form in order to protect what sincerity/authenticity I could, especially growing up closeted and queer in the South.

But lately, as I’ve tried to develop my craft as a poet who never really went through the traditional creative writing workshop system, I’ve been returning to literary form as a way of honoring the poetic traditions that have shaped my work. Having read writers like Carl Phillips, Wanda Coleman, Terrance Hayes, Diane Seuss, and Tarfia Faizullah who are innovating poetic forms like the sonnet, I have come to reevaluate my relationship with form as necessary, generative constraint that pushes the limits of my creativity. One of the ways I tried to embrace constraint was to think about concrete/shape poetry and its simultaneous literalization of what a poem is “about” while also creating an image that may complicate or even subvert the poetic text itself. The experiments throughout this collection have taught me also to appreciate the possibilities of pagination and the negative space created by the poem on the page. Maybe this is why I tend not to think of my poems as meant to be performed aloud as this typographical experimentation and play gets lost.

MC: In a past interview, you mention how your experience with pain shapes your poetry, where you would insert a slash every time the writing process was interrupted by pain. I am really interested in the way you talk about embodiment in your poetry; in what ways has your experience with disability led you to innovate in your poetry?

TCWL: You’ve asked perhaps the most persistent question I’ve confronted in my poetic practice—how do I better acknowledge, honor, and convey the idiosyncrasies of my bodymind in my work without aestheticizing them or performatively tokenizing them? As a scholar, I’ve become really exhausted by the stereotype of the detached, disembodied critic who opines from upon high as if there were not a bodymind at the writing desk producing this work under specific lived conditions. Witnessing disabled scholars, activists, and creatives explicitly write from their positions of pain, discomfort, suffering without euphemism or deflection has been incredibly empowering for me, where I can redefine a relationship to my chronic pain and brain fog, where they are not liabilities in the creative process but assets that make possible the work I want to do. I’m instead learning to ask, “how do I learn from these embodyminded experiences rather than disavow them or excuse them?” Rather than try and force my poetic practice to align with what ablebodyminded poets have prescribed as the right ways to be creative, what if I instead followed the lead of my disabilities who continue to teach me how to survive in an ableist world?

MC: The poems in this collection explore the complicated intersections of family history, disability, queerness, mental illness, joy and pleasure, topics that are still (and increasingly) perceived as taboo and actively pushed into silence. In several poems, you examine silence and silencing, and at the end of part one, a blank page with just the word silence in parentheses. Do you see these poems as a way to break and resist silencing?  

TCWL: Such a beautiful observation! I’ve described elsewhere my indebtedness to the formative influences of the HIV/AIDS poets of the ‘80s and ‘90s. As someone who arrived belatedly to queer history as a gay man, I felt such an obligation to catch up and fill in the gaps of my mostly cishet ableist education. As I was fortunate to learn from some queer elders who took me under their wing when I first came out, part of ethically claiming an identity is becoming responsible for the histories associated with that identity. This involved learning about the remarkable amount of activism that happened during the height of the AIDS crisis (which we must always remember has not ended despite advances in therapeutic technologies, which we know are not universally accessible). Discovering the community building and resistance of organizations like the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) profoundly challenged my instinctive cynical nihilism about the possibilities of social change.

I bring this up because one of ACT UP’s famous activist slogans, “SILENCE = DEATH,” became a lightning rod symbol of AIDS activism. To refuse silence meant to believe in the right to life of those innumerable gay men who were being left to die in the face of an epidemic. In that spirit, my work has always been about refusing the silences around queerness, disability, and race but also (perhaps more importantly) reimagining silence’s possibilities. I have been greatly influenced by my colleague J. Logan Smilges whose work Queer Silence has made me rethink how silence can be generative and vital for queer and crip survival. Can poetry—a form that revolves around silence—teach us to revalue silence away from always meaning complicity or failure and embrace its capacity to be something else entirely?

MC: The final poem in this collection “The Future is Slow,” begins with the beautiful first line, “Slow is the work, the becoming,” which reads like a call to action, a resistance to the hyper-productive pace of our world that harms us and looking toward a more inclusive, community-minded future. How did you arrive at this as the final poem, and what do you hope lingers with readers after they step away?

TCWL: As I was putting this collection together, I knew I wanted to end with this poem as a kind of incantation for the future. I often think of this poem as a complement to an earlier poem in the collection, “Incantation for Access,” which tries to will into being accessibility into a world still so hostile to disabled people.

As a disabled scholar, I’ve been thinking a lot about the capitalistic expectations of productivity as constant and high-speed and which bodyminds are seen as unable to “keep up” or “meet demands.” During the composition of poems that would eventually become this collection, I had been reading about the “slow scholarship” movement and what it might mean to embrace slowness as a deliberate anticapitalist mode of doing intellectual labor in the academy. While there have been rightful critiques of who gets to “slow down” in a culture of higher education that still exploits and abuses adjuncts and other contingent laborers, I think taking seriously how disabled scholars and activists have called for a fuller, revolutionary embrace of “crip time”—the reorientation of time toward meeting bodyminds where they are really at rather than force them into compliance with structures that do not care about actual needs—feels particularly urgent at a cultural moment when hyperproductivity is leaving so many people behind, especially the most vulnerable.

This final poem wishes for a slowness we all deserve, that we all need to live more fully even if that means nothing is being “done,” “made,” or “contributed.” We should never need to do any of these things to earn the right to live on our own terms.

---

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is the author of three previous chapbook collections: The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). His poetry has appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-A-Day” series, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins series, Cincinnati Review, Foglifter and many other publications. He was the winner of the Christopher Hewitt Award for Poetry (2019) and a recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council’s Artists Elevated Prize (2024). He is co-editor of Every Place on the Map Is Disabled: Poems and Essays on Disability (Northwestern University Press, 2026). He currently teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies at Kenyon college and lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Mialise Carney is a writer whose stories and essays have appeared in swamp pink, Booth, Washington Square Review, and other places. She is a PhD student in creative writing and literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she reads for The Cincinnati Review and teaches writing.